Wasn’t it?
He could stop it, couldn’t he?
Couldn’t he? Well, perhaps—
Couldn’t he?
NINA KISSED Luke’s sweet soft cheek as she laid him down into his crib. He had grown so big that letting go of him was a relief.
“Ma, Ma,” he said through his pacifier.
“Shhh,” she whispered. “If you need anything, Grandma and Grandpa will get it.”
Luke whimpered. He pressed his face into the mattress, his legs curled up, and he sucked hard on the pacifier.
Nina inhaled, held her breath, and turned. She walked out purposefully (she heard Luke sit up and make a sound of protest) and did not look back.
Eric confronted her in the hall, his body worried and inquisitive. She shushed him before he could speak and made for the door.
“I didn’t say good—” Eric began.
Nina took his arm. “Just go,” she said. This wasn’t their first departure from Luke, but it was the first Luke knew of. Their other dates — they felt like dates, arranged in advance, dressing up, having a time limit — had been when Luke would fall asleep at six-thirty or seven. They would read him his bedtime stories, give him his bottle, rock him to sleep (Luke almost never woke up during the night, and when he did, it was in the early hours of the morning), and only then would the sitter arrive and Nina and Eric leave. In his infancy, when they were most confident Luke would stay asleep, they used a widow who lived in their building. The widow knew Luke only from encounters in the lobby or elevator, not from her vigils in their apartment. Luke had never stirred, had never known she was there. But finally, as he got older, his bedtime later, his consciousness of the world keener, Nina had decided the deception was too risky, even though they had begun to use Eric’s parents, whom Luke knew well. He might guess, he might delay going to bed just long enough to make them late for an eight o’clock show. He had a tendency to lie awake for up to an hour before falling asleep; if he called out (as he sometimes did) to ask for water, or tell some observation, and Grandma or Grandpa walked in … Well, it was a betrayal, a horrible betrayal, and Luke would be shocked, unforgiving, inconsolable. However difficult telling Luke in advance might be, that honest hurt would keep more important feelings unbruised.
Luke knew Eric’s parents, even had something of a relationship with them, especially with Eric’s father, Barry. How bad could it be for Luke? Leaving him with his grandparents, surely that was nothing, nothing, nothing. Everything was going to be fine.
They got outside, onto the lively Village street, full of students in their wild outfits, full of gays in their wild outfits, full of tourists looking at the wild outfits, full of yuppies in dull outfits not looking at anyone. There were so many people strolling, laughing, on their way to something, that the street had a party atmosphere, a late spring night in New York, too early for the desertion to the Hamptons, or the return to provincial homes after graduation. The Friday release made the gray week of law, banking, publishing, psychiatry into a memory. The black night changed the monochromatic day to fuzzy glowing reds and yellows, winking pinks and blues, bouncing lights everywhere, the city a torchlight parade of celebrants, some decayed, some naïve, some earnest, and some mad.
Nina was glad to be back among them, in the free world, released from the dress gray of motherhood.
“What should we do?” Eric asked. A group of college kids, in torn bulky rags, their young cheeks red with excitement, came bounding by, splitting Eric and Nina.
“Sorry—” one of the girls called back.
“What can we do?” Eric wondered.
They hadn’t made a plan in case Luke’s reaction caused a delay. Now it would be hard to get into a good restaurant without a reservation. “A movie?” Nina asked, thinking of the early days together (only three years ago in fact, but eons in memory) when a movie and late dinner were their coziest, happiest times.
Eric looked doubtful while they rushed around the corner to the stationery store (about to close its doors) and bought a paper to see what was showing. They were out of sync with the local theater’s starting times, but Nina figured out they could go to midtown, grab a bite, and get into a nine o’clock show of a movie they both wanted to see. “Let’s go,” she said, excited, pulling Eric’s large, thick warm hand to get him to the corner.
He hung back, his weight a dragging anchor. “I don’t think we should,” he said, after almost toppling them both.
“Why not?”
“Shouldn’t we stay close by?”
“It’s ten minutes by cab.”
“Should we be in a theater? We can’t call—”
“Sure we can! Eric, he’s with your parents.”
“Some recommendation. Look what they did to me.”
“What did they do to you?” Nina demanded. She thought his mother and father odd, but mostly in a good way, protective, concerned, loving.
“Made me a nervous wreck about my son.”
“Eric, I don’t want to spend our first night out in three months in the lobby of our building.”
“Okay, but.” He sighed. Eric turned his back to her and looked downtown. The World Trade towers could be seen standing alone in the distance, two fat boxes of dotted lights. “Let’s just have dinner. I don’t want to rush uptown.”
“We have plenty of time,” she argued, but with a hopeless feeling. For a moment, among the other partygoers, she had felt young, abrupt, unscheduled.
“We can go to that new restaurant in SoHo.”
“We’ll never get in.”
“Come on,” he said, his big hand pulling her in tow.
She thought: we’ll end up eating crummy bar food, Eric’ll talk about Luke and the market, he’ll say we should get home early to make love, we will, his parents will stay for an hour raving over Luke, Eric will enter me and push in and out tediously until I come, and he’ll come, itching to get out of bed to watch his tapes of the business show, to read his research, fiddle with his numbers, and start that late-night mumble, the chant of dreams—“Low earnings multiple, half book value, possible takeover.”
Try to be cheerful, she ordered herself.
Nina tried. She put her arm through Eric’s, she talked about going back to school, she walked among the others, the ones with real parties to go to, trooping down Broadway past the winking, leering lights, and pretended it would go differently.
But it didn’t.
THE WOMAN came down, her round face came down, a balloon floating right into Byron’s eyes. “Hello, Byron. My name is Tracy. We’re going to go in here and play some games. Your mommy’ll wait for you out here.”
“Okay.” Big boy Byron, big feet forward! He marched on the shiny floor. Foot slaps.
The room was big. There were white hot dog lights way up. Like the big tunnel. Big tunnel to Grandma.
“How many eyes do you have, Byron?”
Big balloon head. One. Two. “Two. Like you.”
Smile. “How many ears do you have?”
“No ears,” Byron said. Cups on ears, his hands covered them. The hair tickled inside.
Bigger smile. “How many ears do you have?”
Dance, big boy. Tunnel sound. His hands were glue, his head a teacup. See my handle, see my spout. “No ears! No ears!”
“Sure you do, Byron. How many?”
Dance! He spun and spun and spun, covered ears, covered hair, hands stuck. “Can’t hear! No ears, no hears, no ears. No hair! Don’t have hair!”